First News Briefs for August 1, 2012

Sierra Wireless has closed its $55 million acquisition of Sagemcom's M2M business, announced mid-June. The transaction will help Sierra expand into Brazil and new market segments such as payment, transportation and railways.

Seattle residents will be able to use their phones to pay for on-street parking through a new contract with PayByPhone. The service will be available at 13,000 parking spaces in the city, and works through an app or toll-free number. A number of other large cities have signed up for PayByPhone's parking service, including Miami, San Francisco, London and Vancouver and Ottawa, Canada.

ZTE reports that it made it into the ranks of the top five global smartphone manufacturers for the first time during the second quarter on shipments of 8 million smartphones. The increase in market share comes as ZTE continues its push into the mid-tier and high-end smartphone market in countries such as China, Turkey and the U.K. The Chinese telecommunications company also says it maintained its number four spot for overall handset shipments worldwide.

Mobilitie says it has completed a distributed antenna system in the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C., the site of the upcoming Democratic National Convention. The system includes 524 antennas located throughout the facility. It will increase the capacity of wireless service for Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile USA.

Keynote Systems says its DeviceAnywhere business performed well during its third fiscal quarter as orders increased and sales rose. The company posted overall sales of $30.3 million, while increased expenses related to DeviceAnywhere and investments in its business resulted in a decline in net income. Looking ahead, Keynote expects sales of between $29 million and $31 million for the fourth quarter, with earnings ranging between a loss of 2 cents per share to a profit of 6 cents per share.

Aepona announced today that its Network as a Service (NaaS) solution has been chosen by Cricket Communications. Cricket will use Aepona’s NaaS solution to attract application developers and content providers to their network. The NaaS solution is based on Aepona’s API Monetization Platform (AMP), deployed as a hosted, fully managed service.

Voxbone has announced it is enabling Lexifone to launch a real-time language-translation service that combines Lexifone’s automated phone-interpreter technology with Voxbone’s voice services. The new Lexifone service, aimed at consumers and businesses, allows each party in a telephone call to speak and be heard in his or her chosen language. The service is being launched worldwide after availability to selected users in closed beta trials for the past five months.